A mailbox is used to store a user's messages. The most common example of a mailbox is an email mailbox used to store emails although mailboxes exist for storing other types of messages or even multiple types of messages. For simplicity, the term email will be used hereafter, including in the claims, to represent not only email by any other type of similar electronic message (e.g., SMS messages, collaboration platform messages, etc.) that is stored in a mailbox.
With the proliferation of email, it has become increasingly difficult to organize a mailbox. One common approach to organizing a mailbox is the use of folders to group together emails. For example, most email services include an inbox folder within the mailbox that groups together the user's received emails. Most email providers also provide folders to group together sent emails, drafts, deleted emails, etc. Such folders are typically default folders having unmodifiable rules defining which emails the folders will contain.
Most email providers also provide the ability to create custom folders within a mailbox. These custom folders may or may not be associated with rules. For example, a user may create a custom folder without rules in which case emails would only be stored in the custom folder if the user manually moved the emails into the custom folder. In contrast, a user may create a custom folder and specify rules defining which emails should be stored in the custom folder. In such cases, the rules can be applied to applicable emails (e.g., to all emails in the mailbox or to emails in a particular folder such as the inbox) to automatically determine whether the emails should be moved into the custom folder. These rules can be applied only at a particular time (e.g., only on emails currently stored in a particular folder) or can be applied on an ongoing basis (e.g., whenever an email is received or sent).
The ability to define custom rules for organizing emails into custom folders facilitates organizing a mailbox. However, defining custom rules that properly organize emails is a tedious, problematic, and difficult process. For these reasons, custom rules are oftentimes only employed by advanced users.